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The Best Four Resources for Startup Self Education

Here today we’re reviewing the top four best resources for self education around the web. Crucial to any entrepreneurial venture, small business, or success is a history in self education, and spirit of curiosity. Here at Anant, we are constantly reading, looking for the most cutting edge tools and technologies to implement for our clients, and every single one of our encouraging curiosity and exploration amongst our team members. We strongly believe that an desire to educate the self is one of the best indicators of success in either individuals or organizations.

Today Mixergy is a place where successful people teach ambitious upstarts.

The people who speak on this web site or at live Mixergy events are businesspeople who take some time out of their schedules to help teach others what they learned from their own experiences. They are people like Jimmy Wales who taught us how he got the world to help him make Wikipedia into a world-changing site. And people like Gregg Spiridellis who told us how it felt to watch his company, JibJab, get reduced to almost nothing, and taught us how he turned his business around.

Mixergy conducts superb case studies of successful entrepreneurs across all industries. Founder Andrew Warner has done some amazing interviews with wildly successful people like Gary Vaynerchuck and Ramit Sethi. Mixergy also has an excellent premium educational resource called Mixergy Premium where he has built up a reservoir of Master Classes on topics ranging from SEO and building traffic to your site, to productivity, to closing sales.

Andrews interviews are a pleasure to listen to, and make for great podcast material if you download the mP3 files to listen to at the gym or on a walk.

The Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) Entrepreneurship Corner is a free online archive of entrepreneurship resources for teaching and learning. The mission of the project is to support and encourage faculty around the world who teach entrepreneurship to future scientists and engineers, as well as those in management and other disciplines. The site has been developed by a dynamic team of educators, entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP). The project has been financially supported by Stanford University and a number of generous sponsors. Other collaborators in its creation include the Stanford Center for Professional Development and Stanford Video.

We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.

Through this, we hope to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few. We want to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.

Coursera has an array of amazingly creative courses on topics ranging from Gamification to Modern Contemporary American Poetry. Professors from universities like U Penn and Princeton have taken their course materials online to scale reach, and help educate more people than they’d be able to from a traditional brick and mortar classroom.

If you’re looking for classes like you’d find in a traditional university setting with all of the benefits and flexibility of the internet – look no further than Coursera.

The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We’re a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.

All of the site’s resources are available to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy’s materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.

You might be familiar with Khan Academy from Sal Khan’s TED talk here, where he discusses reinventing education by making use of online video. Entrepreneurs and small business may be particularly interested in the Valuation portion of videos from Sal, where he explains the process of seeking Angel and VC funding, and how an Angel or VC values companies in the VC portion.

Conclusion

So, do you need education about some aspect of business, entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, or operations, but not want to spend a few years locking down an MBA? We strongly believe that you can gain wisdom by listening to people who are a few steps ahead of you on these online educational resources. Each of these resources has a different niche in online education, though all have resources relevant for small business and entrepreneurs.

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As It Changes is published by the boutique internet architecture and strategy consulting firm Anant Corporation.

We publish this blog to inspire, educate, and empower the next generation of modern entrepreneurs around the world.

We named our blog "as it changes," to reflect the reality that the business of business today is always changing. We've learned lessons by experimenting, working for our clients, and good honest mistakes while helping build modern enterprises around the world.